Carefully Chosen Sports Stats — Daniel Myers

Point Guard Comparison Chart

So, what else can Google Motion Charts be used to visualize? Well, this application doesn’t actually *move*, but it does visualize a ton of point guard advanced statistics at once.

That’s quite a few advanced stats in one place! Play around with the chart and see what can be revealed. I have 4 player evaluation metrics here; my Advanced Statistical Plus/Minus (which is based on a statistical plus/minus framework, but using advanced stats and not a simple linear regression) along with my VORP formulation, John Hollinger‘s PER (which is an offensive metric only), Dean Oliver’s Offensive and Defensive Ratings, and Basketball Reference’s Win Shares. It’s informative to compare them, and to look at which inputs (like TS% or ORB%) are more valued by them.

As for the point guards–look at Rose and Westbrook. They’re just about clones! Also, note Rondo’s defense and Nash’s offense.

Let me know what you think of using google motion charts. My not-very-involved opinion is that they are fun for playing with, but are kind of a pain considering they don’t add much information. More of a tool to use when exploring data than something that adds new data. I’m trying R for some DT posts in the pipeline, but its a little obscure in the documentation. They tell you WHAT everything is, but rarely have I found a simple explanation of HOW to do something.

Yeah, R is tough to learn. I really haven’t gotten into it so far, though I’m looking into learning more.

Google motion charts are the only chart setup I have seen that can show 4 or even 5 dimensions of data simultaneously. It’s exceptionally good as an interactive charting tool, and quite easy to implement on a website, if you can inject the required code into the header. On my newest charts, I’m pulling the data directly from a Google Spreadsheet, rather than embedding it in the header–thus cleaning up the html considerably.